Connections 2007 – Day 2 Wrap-up
Another great day at the Windows Connections 2007 conference in Orlando, FL, at least for me. Got to a keynote, three interesting sessions and some time with Microsoft, just to chat.
This morning’s keynote was Exchange 2007: Getting to Know You presented by Tony Redmond of HP. Pretty good information, though it was kind of tilted to Exchange geeks (of which I’m not). It did set the stage for a session later in the morning.
Next was the Imaging Windows Vista session presented by Chris Henley of Microsoft. Talking through the progression of Microsoft imaging methods and technologies from MS-DOS 6.22 through Windows Vista (yes they had deployment tools for DOS). Creating and maintaining Windows Vista images will be much easier than it is today with Windows XP. Pretty cool too!
Mid-morning found me in The Unified Communications Technical Vision & Strategy session with Bob Williams of Microsoft. Bob walked us through Microsoft’s vision of what fully unified communications is and will be. I’d seen portions of this roadmap about two weeks ago at a local Microsoft IT Leadership Summit in Minneapolis. Very interesting… it’ll be fun to watch what happens in the telephony market later this year and in 2008. Big changes afoot.
After lunch I had a chance to sit down with some folks and provide some feedback on Office, Exchange, Windows, SharePoint, and Systems Management Server (I’m a big believer in SMS). It was fun, fast paced and lead to interesting discussions that never seemed to get finished in the time we had.
For the last session of the day, I choose What’s New in the 2007 Microsoft Office System? Client Feature Walkthrough hosted by Chris Avis, again of Microsoft. While Chris is a pretty good speaker, his enthusiasm of the product, and the unstructured nature of his presentation did not allow him to get as much info demonstrated in the time we had. He did cover a number of neat features of Outlook, Excel, OneNote, and a few Word features as well. Nifty stuff in Office 2007 for those that have not seen or worked with it yet.
Overall, a good experience; if you want a full list of the sessions available at the spring Connections 2007 conference, look here.
